


Mirror, Mirror

by thedevilchicken



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Apocalypse, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Future Fic, Getting Together, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 15:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10573728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Sarah makes a mistake she can't take back and finds out Jareth is not the only king. Some of the others are much, much worse.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



"You've always been so quick to believe the worst of me," Jareth said, his tone clipped and his eyes more than usually sharp. "Have you stopped to consider that you might be wrong?"

Sarah remembers her reaction and she's not proud of it. She remembers laughing at him, bitterly, because he'd never not been the worst man she'd ever known, though she supposes he's not even technically a man, not even now, in her world. She remembers how irritated he looked about it, how put out he seemed by it; he didn't even really seem surprised, which is the thing that's really stuck with her - he just looked pissed off and let down. She didn't understand that at the time. She does now. 

"Do it," she told Eleanor, sure of herself in that particular moment, at the very least as sure of herself as she was of Jareth, though things have changed somewhat since then. Sarah couldn't do it herself, though she knows she would have - she didn't have the crystal ball for starters, because Eleanor did, and she was the only thing there keeping Jareth at bay with the thin silver chain that she'd looped around his wrist - and so Eleanor did it instead. She didn't hesitate. At the time, Sarah admired that. She remembers thinking she hoped she'd still be that brave if she lived to be seventy-five years old. She's honestly not sure now that she will. She's much less sure than she was back then. 

Eleanor held the crystal ball up to the one of the twelve huge, heavy mirrors hanging on the walls, the one the fairy had said it would be. Her reflection in the glass swam like ripples in water till it settled, slowly, and the faintest, faded figure of a man smiled back at her from in it; he held out one empty, wispy hand, palm up, and in the fraction of a second that it took for Sarah's eyes to blink, his hand filled and Eleanor's emptied. He was holding the crystal ball then, the goblin glass ball, the trick of Jareth's magic that kept the doors between the Goblin and the Faerie worlds locked tight. And as the man's fingers tightened up around it, as he crushed it in his hand, as the glass bit in and he began to bleed thickly down his wrist, into his sleeve, dripping to the floor, his form began to coalesce. 

The colors in the mirror deepened, the blond of his hair and the black of his clothes waking out of foggy grays. The image sharpened into tighter focus as Eleanor's own reflection began to fade. Then he tapped his bloody forefinger against the glass inside the mirror's wrought iron frame and it shattered into pieces like he'd hit it with a hammer and not just touched it with his fingertip. Sarah jumped and Jareth bristled but the glass just hung there in the air, in bloodied, shining shards, instead of scattering. None of it seemed right. Somehow, it didn't feel much like the victory that they'd been hoping for. Through the chain, she could feel Jareth's anger; through the chain, she feel his dread. 

The man stepped through, though Sarah guesses he was never really a man. He lifted one booted foot and he stepped over the frame and into the hall of mirrors they were standing in, there in Jareth's castle, leaving a room behind that looked the same but without the huge mirrors hanging on the walls. He stepped into the room from the other side, from another world, and when he dropped what was left of Jareth's crystal ball to the ground, all the mirror glass fell, too. Sarah flinched at the suddenness of it, and the sound of the glass as it rained down onto the stone floor, and when the man from the mirror looked at her, she frowned. His eyes were mismatched, just the way that Jareth's are. he looked startlingly familiar.

"Thank you, Ms. Williams," he said, and his voice was as sharp and fractured as the broken glass on the floor at his feet. It made Sarah wince, though she tried not to. Something was wrong, and she knew it. She was suddenly, irrevocably certain of it. She'd made a mistake. "I could never have done this without you."

"I..." she replied, or at least she started to, then she paused and she swallowed, her pulse pounding in her ears, because _something was wrong_. "I. You're welcome?"

He smiled, almost pleasant in the start like it had been in the mirror but then it turned. His smile broadened, he smiled more widely than he had before, his lips starting to part with it, and Sarah couldn't look away. His teeth were sharp, a row of jagged points in bloodied gums, and she's wondered since if the blood was even his. Then he looked away from her, his gaze flicking abruptly to her side. He looked straight at Jareth.

"Father," Jareth said, abruptly, like a curse. 

"Son," the man replied, the sound like needles in Sarah's ears, and behind him something through the mirror writhed. He turned away and he motioned to it, all the twisted silver rings on his fingers shining in the moonlight. There were hands on the other side, beyond the mirror, behind the wall, there were mouths and teeth and wings and sounds that made Sarah's skin crawl. There were sounds that made her head swim. There were sounds that made bile rise up in her throat. 

"Jareth?" Sarah said, her eyes on the things in the mirror as her stomach lurched. "Jareth, what's happening?"

He turned her face toward him with one hand, though he shouldn't have been able to move with the way he was bound to her, not unless she let him. He turned her face to him with his one free hand that wasn't currently bound up with a silver chain that she'd been told would put him under her control if she just wanted it to, and it had done exactly that, and more. He turned her face, his fingers tight at her chin until the only thing she could do was look away from the mirror and straight up at him instead. He looked her straight in the eye, from far too close by, till he was the only thing she could see, or wanted to.

"It's everything that I told you would happen," he replied, his tone harsh and the expression on his face almost as horrifying as it was horrified. Sarah isn't sure she's ever been as scared as she was then. "You've killed us all."

"I don't understand."

Eleanor shrieked; Sarah tried to turn to look but Jareth held her face still so she couldn't. The other end of the chain that was around his wrist was wrapped around her palm and suddenly she knew whatever magic there was in it bound her to him just as much as it bound him to her. They were cancelling each other out through it, they were fighting for control through it, but that meant they were connected - whatever had stayed with her when she'd beaten him and left the labyrinth fit into him like puzzle pieces and she understood without really understanding and she was terrified. She was _terrified_ , because somehow she knew that what was coming through that mirror was ten times worse than Jareth had ever been, or could be. She was terrified because she knew Jareth knew he couldn't win. He'd been outplayed, and she'd been the piece on the board that put him in check.

"Don't look," he said, though who knew why he cared what she was seeing. She nodded tightly.

"Close your eyes," he said. She squeezed them shut.

"Give me the chain," he said. She untangled it from around around her palm and she handed it to him. She didn't even hesitate. She gave him back control his power, or at least of the parts that were in him and not stuck somewhere in her.

There was a crash and the sound of shattering glass and someone screamed though she had no idea who it could possibly be - Eleanor was dead, she knew that even if she hadn't seen it, and João and Silvana were still stuck somewhere outside the hall, climbing endless staircases that lead to everywhere and nowhere and then back again unless you really know where it is you're going. She was alone with the two fae men and the nightmares watching through the mirror. The castle shook. The eleven great mirrors that remained all clattered loudly against the walls till she almost thought they might break, too. Sarah kept her eyes shut tight and told herself she wasn't a coward for doing so, she just knew she couldn't match them in a fight.

"No!" bellowed the Faerie King, his voice like knives in Sarah's head, and Jareth made a wounded noise that made Sarah's stomach drop. The castle shook harder; Sarah dropped to her knees, knocked off her feet by it, like an earthquake in the stone, and she felt broken glass bite through the denim of her jeans. 

"No!" the Faerie King screamed again, and then silence except for the mirrors' frames that still rattled hard against the walls and Sarah flinched as a hand closed on hers. It was hot and wet and when she opened her eyes, she already knew somehow that hand would be Jareth's. He was down on his knees in front of her, right there with her, kneeling on the glass.

His lips were pressed together thinly, his jaw clenched tight. He was bleeding from his side, from a spot by his ribs where his shirt was torn and she didn't need to see inside to know his skin was, too. He was wrapping the chain back around their hands as he laced the bloody fingers of one hand with hers. The broken mirror was nowhere to be seen, just a faded space on the wall where it had been before, and as tied he their hands together she knew he'd sent it away somehow, to somewhere else in the kingdom, the junk yard, an oubliette, she didn't know where but she knew for a certainty that it couldn't last for long. He'd be back, and he'd be bringing the mirror with him. 

"There's not much time," he said. "Take us to your world." 

"But João and Silvana..."

His eyes narrowed sharply. "You're not simple, Sarah," he said. "Take _the castle_."

"I don't have that kind of power." 

He smiled thinly. He held up their joined hands. 

She felt the moment that he stopped fighting her. She felt the moment that he gave her all the power she needed to do the thing he couldn't, and ask the labyrinth to take them home. Opening the door once a decade is one thing, and he's evidently been good at it for quite some time, but some things takes a human wish and not a fae one. Even if they don't make sense, the border between their worlds has rules.

"You have everything you need," he said. And she knew she did, so she did it. 

She took a deep breath, and she took them home.

\---

Sarah wakes up every morning in her bed in her New York apartment. Sometimes she's alone and sometimes she's not. It's complicated. 

She wakes up every morning and she showers and she brushes her teeth and she scowls at the taste of her first cup of coffee against the mint of her toothpaste, taking sips while she's blow-drying her hair. She cut it short once, not long after she came back from the labyrinth the first time, because she was totally convinced she'd feel more mature without it; she remembers holding her cut-off hair in her hands under the salon's too-bright lights and trying really hard not to cry in front of the stylist. She didn't feel older. She grew it back as soon as she could, and didn't feel right till she had. 

She wakes up every morning and she showers and she brushes her teeth. She drinks coffee and eats breakfast, fruit or yogurt or a bowl of the cereal Jareth claims to like though she's pretty sure it's just because it has a leprechaun on the box and he claims to have known one once - honestly, she wouldn't be surprised to find that's true, considering. Then she dresses and she goes to work, walks twelve minutes to the subway station - fifteen when it's icy in the winter months - and rides in the rest of the way. When she thinks she sees a fairy, she ignores it. It used to be because she thought she was imagining it; now it's because she knows she's not.

Jareth sometimes drops by around lunchtime and they go to the park if the weather's good or they sit at the desk in her office if it's not and they eat sandwiches from the bakery on the corner where the fae girl with the hot pink hair works. She looks about seventeen and she acts about seventeen and Sarah's willing to bet her ID even says she's about seventeen, but she's not because she really can't be. The fae don't age the same way humans do and anyway, the pastries she makes are practically magical. Jareth says they're likely not _actually_ magical, but who knows what the truth is where Jareth's concerned. A lot of things she thought she knew about him have turned out to be wrong. 

After work, she goes home on the subway in the usual familiar crush of people and sometimes she goes out jogging for a while after that or she puts on the kickboxing DVD she likes to try to convince herself she likes or sometimes she just fixes dinner and exercise be damned, at least for one night. She makes enough for two even though she's never sure if she'll be eating alone or not and leftovers will wait if he's not there. Sometimes he is. Other times he's not. She stopped trying to predict what he'll do day to day a long time ago.

Sometimes he comes in past midnight and brings along guests - she had no idea there were so many fae in the human world till suddenly they were meeting them once a week or more - and they all march through her room while she's trying to sleep and out again through the closet door and she tells herself she's too tired to be mad at him, but she's mad at him. Sometimes he comes in with Thai food while she's still stretched out on her pilates mat and it's tough to be mad at him when her stomach growls at the smell of it. He comes and goes as he pleases and so does she. 

Sometimes, he comes in after she's already changed and gone to bed and he strips down and joins her even though he hates her and she hates him and they don't and they do and they _should_ but maybe not, and...it's complicated. It's really complicated. Almost three years since that night now, and it's never gotten any closer to straightforward.

Tonight, he took her to the theater. He does that sometimes, probably more for his own sake than for hers because she knows he enjoys it and they just never really had theater where he comes from. _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ seemed oddly apt somehow and every time he laughs and smiles and frowns and sighs as he watches a play, like he did tonight, all those things are so exaggerated on his face that even now he doesn't seem quite human, probably because he doesn't really try. He wears the clothes but they don't help. He wore his hair pulled back into a ponytail for the first few months and then he cut it short, but neither thing really made him seem more human, either. His attempts are only superficial.

Some nights, when he undresses, she's still awake and she can see his scar. She's got to admit she never really thought that someone like Jareth could be injured, but there's a long, pale scar just above his hip from the blade and from the surgery after. He likes to pretend he's never been hurt sometimes, like he's invincible or invulnerable or whatever fae kings like to think they are, and maybe he can't get sick the way humans can, but Sarah remembers what happened. Sometimes, when he comes to bed, she runs her fingers over that scar and she wonders what would have happened if Jareth had died and sometimes, the way he looks at her when she does it, she can tell that's what he's thinking, too. After all, there's still a stain on the floor in the hall of mirrors; it's faded, but Sarah's not sure it'll ever be completely gone. Every time they go in there, it's a stark reminder of how close they came.

Tonight, she watches him from the bed as he undresses. Somehow he manages to wear a suit - a well-cut but ultimately boring, normal suit - like it's another of his outlandish goblin outfits; maybe it's the fact that even in a world where only one in a hundred thousand people might even _think_ they recognize him, he's still got all the swagger he ever had on the other side of the door. And when he takes off the suit and he hangs it up, when he takes off his tie - the one she bought him for the birthday that's not really his that's written on his excellent fake ID - and his shirt and his underwear, he looks at her. It's like he knows what she's thinking, though that's not actually one of his gifts. He looks at her like he did in the labyrinth back when she was still fifteen and something in her tightens, something flutters. 

He smiles sharply. He strokes himself with one hand as he approaches. She knows what will happen next, and she pulls off her nightshirt because she wants it to. She always does, though it came as a surprise to her. Perhaps it shouldn't have. 

The first time he kissed her, she flinched. She still thinks that's an understandable reaction, given that maybe twenty-four hours prior to that she'd still been convinced he was the Bad Guy, capital B, capital G, and he was just then waking up from surgery, but she flinched and Jareth looked bizarrely wounded. He passed out again almost immediately afterwards, though, so it was easy to put the whole thing down to blood loss. 

The second time was six weeks later. He'd moved in with her, inconveniently, though it had turned out he surprisingly had plenty of choices - she just guessed it was about the thing inside her closet more than it was anything else, especially her, or maybe he meant it as some kind of punishment for what she'd done because the apartment's not really big enough for two and there he was, day in and day out, eating her food and lounging on her couch, reading all her books and playing with Caleb next door's crazy escape artist cat while his wound slowly healed. They didn't really talk much then, not they do much more now, just enough for her to show him how the TV worked, how to turn on the shower, the little things they didn't really have over there in the goblin world, and at the end of each day he slept on her couch like that could've been comfortable with the stitches in his side. She told herself she didn't kick him out because she had things to make up for, but even if she blamed herself, she blamed him too. She still does. 

"You're crying," he said, when he came into her room that night, six weeks after their arrival. And she was, she guesses. She'd done quite a lot of that since they'd gotten back. 

"Great observation," she replied, pulling herself up in bed. She leaned back against the headboard and reached for a tissue to dry her eyes and she flicked on the lamp and God, he was barefoot and stripped to the waist in a pair of sweatpants she'd had to buy him because she'd found she really couldn't let him walk around her apartment in his goblin clothes. With his long hair down out of the ponytail, even with the scar still looking angry at his side, even with his customary makeup nowhere to be found, he looked every inch like he might still have been there in the labyrinth and maybe like she still was, too. 

He pursed his lips. " _Why_ are you crying?" he said. 

"Maybe because the goblin king ate all my bagels earlier today," she replied. 

He sighed. He _had_ eaten all her bagels, but she knew that wasn't quite the point. She's never made a habit of weeping over baked goods. 

"I'm thinking about my friends," she said, in the end, when it became disgustingly clear that he wasn't going to leave until he had a satisfactory reponse. "I didn't see them while we were there. I don't know if they're alive or dead." 

"I'm thinking about my kingdom," he said, pointedly enough that she winced with it and he sighed again and crossed his arms over his chest and he tilted his head this way and that as she looked at him and he looked at her. Then he crossed the room. He sat down on the edge of her bed. 

"They're alive," he said, straightforwardly, like he'd never heard of such a thing as subtlety or a bedside manner, and he took her face in his hands before she could tell him not to. She flinched again and his expression flashed clear irritation, but then he rubbed her damp cheeks with his thumbs. "They're most likely being held as conspirators, for now."

"Is that meant to be comforting?"

"Did you find it comforting?"

"Not really." 

"Then it's not." He shrugged. "But we can save them." 

"We can?"

"We can," he confirmed. "You and I, Sarah; together, we can do anything." 

And sitting there, looking him straight in his oddly colored eyes, she believed him. The truth was, of all the things he'd done, she knew he'd never actually lied to her, not unless she'd expected him to. She's just never been quite sure since that that means he never will. 

Of course, when he kissed her, she flinched again. He sighed and walked away, and honestly he wasn't sure if that was the outcome she'd wanted or not. 

The third time, she kissed him. 

He'd just cut his hair short - it was all over the floor and in the bathroom washbasin and stuck in the hinge of her best kitchen scissors and somehow, _somehow_ , even with all the mess he'd made, the result looked good on him, like he'd spent an hour in a salon and paid a hundred dollars for it and not just hacked at it himself. He was sitting at the dining table when she came in from work that day, after dark, wet and chilly and irritable from the winter rain outside, and there he was, his hair all over the fricking floor, running his hands over the new cut. 

"What did you do?" she asked, toeing off her boots by the door. There was already hair stuck to them. 

"I cut my hair," he said. "I think it suits me."

She took off her coat and put down her bag and when she'd done so, she gestured at the floor. "You didn't think to clear this up?" she asked. 

He shrugged. "You don't think it suits me, Sarah?" he said, and she threw up her hands and grabbed a broom from the closet by the door. "I think it makes me look more human."

There was something about the tone of his voice as he said it that stopped her in her tracks and she stood there, broom in hand, frowning at him across the room. He did look different, she remembers thinking; in jeans and the button-down shirt he was wearing, with the new short hair, you'd almost have thought he was human if you didn't look too closely at him. But there was still something about the way he sat, about the way he cocked his head as he looked at her, about the expression on his face...there was something about him, something _fae_ about him, something not quite of this world. She'd found it threatening once, in the start, but right then she found it oddly reassuring. He was still the goblin king, even with short hair and a scar hidden underneath his button-down shirt. Perhaps they could save her friends - and his kingdom - after all. 

She had her fingers in his hair before she'd even realized she was thinking of doing it. She rested her forehead down against his as he sat at the table and she stood there leaning over him. And when she kissed him, she didn't flinch. Neither did he.

"They'll still recognize you," she said when she pulled back, her fingers still all tangled in his hair. "Especially if you wear the right clothes." She knew what she was saying. So did he. 

"Then we should go," he said, and he glanced toward the bedroom door, though she knew it was the bedroom closet that his glance was really aimed at. 

She nodded. He stood. 

As they headed for the door, she wondered what stepping through a mirror would actually feel like. 

\---

Silvana was the first to arrive, and bustled through the apartment door once Sarah had opened it in a flurry of words so quick and unexpected that Sarah only caught about half of them. It was mostly about traffic and how much she hated coming into the city except for the shopping sometimes, of course, and that time her mom took her to _Cats_ , and Sarah looked at her, basically dumbfounded. Silvana laughed and put down her bags and held out her hand. 

"I guess I should quit for a second and introduce myself," she said, with a bright, friendly grin. "Silvana Bianchi. I'm here for the you-know-what." And that was interesting because she looked more like the lovechild of a hardcore trail hiker and a suburban soccer mom in a twinset and pearls and muddy-cleated walking boots than she did someone who'd misplaced a baby brother or sister in a goblin labyrinth. Then again, who knew what they were meant to look like. They couldn't all look like Sarah and besides, she guessed she was the one who'd gotten her baby brother back. 

Sarah frowned as she shook Silvana's hand there by the kitchen counter where she'd dumped her numerous bags. "The you-know-what?" she asked.

Silvana shrugged, and she took off her coat and tossed it over the back of a dining chair, making herself comfortable already. "You know," she said. "The fairy sent me. Like that makes any sense and I don't sound like a lunatic. But you know what I mean, right?"

Sarah knew what she meant. She kind of wishes she'd feigned total ignorance and sent Silvana on her way, but back then they'd both thought they were doing the right thing. They wouldn't have been there otherwise.

They were eating little sandwiches from a cooler Silvana had brought with her - Sarah wasn't sure if that came more from the hiker side of things or the soccer mom - when the doorbell rang next. They almost didn't hear it over the show they were watching because Sarah's TV had revolted a couple of months earlier and she'd just never had time to get it fix, a Spanish soap opera that they were doing _really_ badly at translating out loud with Sarah's half-forgotten high school Spanish and Silvana's extrapolation from childhood Italian - she and her parents had emigrated back when she was seventeen, she said, getting pretty close to twenty years ago - to the point they were basically making it up. Sarah went to the door and it turned out that second to arrive was Eleanor, who smiled and thanked her as she came inside and Silvana zapped off the TV with the remote, or at least muted it. With the poor state of their collective Spanish, that might've actually made more sense. 

Eleanor looked seventy years old if she looked a day, gray-haired and thin with a pair of glasses that looked like something out of the 1950s though they managed to suit her somehow. She'd managed the stairs up to Sarah's place, though, so she guesses she must've been pretty active, and once she'd introduced herself she started asking them both questions about their time in the labyrinth that it was pretty clear neither Silvana nor Sarah herself wanted to answer. She seemed nice enough, though, at least back then, harmless but maybe a little tone-deaf because as the night wore on, she kept coming back to the labyrinth again and again even though they changed the subject. Sarah told herself it was normal, it must've been the nerves, but she kept coming back to Jareth, and had they both met him, too? And how long ago was it for Sarah? Ten years. How long for Silvana? _Twenty_.

"It's sixty years for me," Eleanor told them, conspiratorially, like the three of them were sharing a secret and Sarah guesses in a way they were. "I still remember it all like it was yesterday. Don't you?"

They both really wished they didn't, but they both did. 

Sarah and Silvana took turns at pumping up the crappy air bed in front of the couch later on that night, once they'd changed the sheets on Sarah's bed and set Eleanor up in there, though Sarah guesses that was as much for their sake so they could get a few hours of peace as it was for hers. And when the bedroom door was closed and they turned out the lamp on the stand by the TV, Silvana sighed and said, "I lost my baby sister in the labyrinth." 

"I'm really sorry," Sarah replied, her eyes closed on the couch. "It was my half-brother, for me." 

"But you got him back."

"I did."

"You know, you're lucky."

Even considering what a pain Toby can be, even now, calling her past midnight in the summer because he's forgotten the time difference from the west coast where his mom's parents live, calling her old because she turned twenty-seven last year and she's nearly twenty-eight and he's not even out of high school yet, she knows she's lucky. She should have never wished him away. She can't imagine what it must've been like for Silvana to lose her sister, at least not really. Unlike some of the others, she never came back.

João was last. Sarah had been told there'd be three people joining her and then there he was, bright and early just past 7am on Sunday morning while Eleanor was in the shower and Sarah and Silvana were doing a really poor job of making pancakes in the kitchen, still in their pyjamas and robes. 

"I thought you'd be ready," he said, gruffly, lingering in the doorway when he saw the two of them and the distressing quantity of pancake batter they'd managed to get all over themselves. Apparently neither of them was a spectacular cook and the look he gave them, all intense dark eyes and black hair shot through with gray, Sarah guessed maybe fifty-five years old, it was kind of like an adult walking in on a teenage slumber party gone wrong, or it was until Silvana laughed and ushered him inside. He dropped his backpack by the door, took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He made the pancakes, probably to save himself from the two of them. He even ate a few before they left. 

"How does this work?" João asked, an hour later, as they were all standing there at Sarah's closet door. It was the door they'd chosen, just in case it all went wrong - it led nowhere so there was no one else could try to open it from the other side, no well-meaning landlord or misdirected pizza guy to try the handle and wind up in the goblin world. 

"The fairy said the labyrinth remembers us," Sarah replied. "It's the anchor between here and there. We just have to ask it to open the door for us." 

"You mean the labyrinth remembers _you_ ," Eleanor said. " _You_ have to ask it to open the door."

Sarah sighed. "Well, yes," she said, awkward though it couldn't have come as a surprise to any of them, considering what they knew she'd done because it turned out their mutual acquaintance had a really big mouth for a tiny little fairy. "But I don't know how." 

Silvana put her hand reassuringly on Sarah's arm. "Just ask," she said. "No one cares if you sound like a moron. We've all been there." Her grip tightened just slightly. "And we've all _been there_." They'd all been there and lost, she meant. Sarah steeled herself. She could only imagine how much worse the whole thing felt for the three of them, with what they'd lost and she'd gotten back.

But it turned out she didn't even have to say the words. The door creaked open just a crack and when Sarah reached to open it, her heart pounding, almost shivering, there it all was on the other side. It was just like she remembered it. It was everything she'd tried so hard to forget.

"Are you ready?" Sarah asked them. 

Eleanor smiled widely. Silvana gave a tight little nod. João pulled on his backpack, looking faintly grim, and Sarah took that as a yes. She stepped through; the others followed, then she closed the door behind them just in case. 

"Well, this is a place I never thought I'd be again," Silvana said. 

"Me, too," Sarah replied, as she started toward the gate; the others followed, not very far behind. She still knew the way, she thought, and she realized, as they walked, that she wasn't sure anyone else there did. She was the only one who'd ever beaten Jareth; maybe she was the only one who'd ever made it through the labyrinth at all. Maybe one of them there had never even made it past the first turn. Maybe they'd given up any of the times that she'd refused to. She didn't know them at all.

"What exactly are we meant to do?" João asked, as they passed through the gate. 

"Stop Jareth," Silvana replied, with a strained little smile of amusement as she stated the perfectly obvious. 

"But _how_?"

"The fairy said I should use this," Sarah said, pulling the chain from the hip pocket of her jeans as they walked. She dangled it in the air then wound the length of it around the palm of her hand, ready, just in case. 

It had looked like it had taken all the little fairy's strength and then some to hoist the four foot length of chain up from the street to Sarah's balcony, but somehow it had done it anyway - she supposed at the time that its king's kingdom had depended on it, and maybe its life or several others', too, or maybe fairies were just exceptionally strong, who knew, because for all she was the only one who'd ever beaten Jareth, she definitely wasn't exactly an expert on fairy anatomy. She remembers wishing she could have asked Hoggle, who might have known more about fairies than she did, at least, but she hadn't really seen him since the removals guys had broken her bedroom mirror when she and her dad and her stepmom and Toby had all moved house sometime back before she'd moved out to go to college. She'd only gotten glimpses now and then, reflections, but when she turned they were gone. She'd always assumed she'd imagined it. Maybe she had. She still doesn't know, at least not for sure. 

The chain was long and thin but still really strong somehow, and Sarah just figured it was fairy-made or something like that and probably not just silver like it looked. She realizes now she probably should've questioned that. There were a lot of things she should've questioned. There were a lot of things that relied heavily on what she thought of Jareth.

"What are you meant to do with it?" Silvana asked. 

"Wrap one end around him and one end around me," she replied. "The fairy said that would stop him. I beat him before, so I have some kind of power over him." 

"And then someone takes the crystal ball while he can't stop us," Eleanor said. 

"And we open the door to the fairy kingdom," Silvana added. "We let the Faerie King in. We level the playing field so they're not totally defenseless to a goblin attack." 

"And then we hope for the best while the fairies do the rest." And hell, it sounded reasonable to her at the time, it really did. 

"That's a pretty vague plan." João frowned, shifting his backpack as they walked. "How do we know this is going to work? How do we know where he'll be? How do we know he's not watching us right now?"

"You want written instructions?" Silvana asked. 

"I'd feel a whole lot better about it if we had, yeah." 

Sarah sighed, half convinced she'd've been better off going there alone. "Let's just get there," she said, because that was what she'd done before, and it'd worked before, flying entirely by the seat of her pants. She hadn't had a plan and it had all worked out fine. "We'll figure it out." 

She really, really wishes that they had.

\---

When Sarah opens her closet door these days, what she sees inside isn't actually her closet. 

Honestly, she's not sure where her closet went and she's still not terribly pleased about it - there were things inside that she'd have liked to have kept, like the majority of her clothes and her shoes for a start because she's had to buy new ones. Then there's her high school yearbook with the photo from when she played Ophelia in _Hamlet_ her senior year, her camera and a stack of old home movies all on VHS like she even has a VHS player anymore. All her mom's old press cuttings were in there, too, though Sarah hadn't actually looked at them in years, with her good umbrella that she'd propped up in the corner after next door's rogue cat had gotten in and started clawing at it when she'd kept it by the front door. And her copy of _The Labyrinth_ was in there, that she'd stuffed underneath a box of yoga props from that time Francine at work had convinced her to tag along to classes. 

But what she sees when she opens her closet door these days is the hall of mirrors. When she steps through the door, she's inside Jareth's castle; it's waiting there, like some kind of pocket of folded-up space inside her building but then again not because Mr. and Mrs. Yang's apartment is definitely still right next door. There's blank, empty space that stretches into nothing outside of all the doors and windows. It's waiting there for what comes next. They're all waiting, even the ones who don't know it.

She remembers the exact moment the castle settled in her world instead of Jareth's, because the moonlight outside the window vanished and then the only light they had was the flashlight in João's hand as he and Silvana came running breathless into the room - apparently he'd been the only one with the foresight to pack anything useful before they'd left. She supposes she hadn't needed anything the first time so she'd thought she wouldn't need anything that time, either, even when João had pulled on his backpack before they left her apartment. The castle had been at the other side of her closet door then, too, or at least when they'd stepped through the door they'd been able to see the castle at the center of the labyrinth before the door had swung closed again and disappeared behind them; she's not sure why she was so surprised that it vanished completely, but there it is. 

The door at the far side of the hall of mirrors swung open slowly, and inside it was Sarah's bedroom with the lights still on. She could see her bed with the quilt on it that her grandmother had made and a photo on the desk of Toby playing baseball. That was definitely her room.

"Sarah, what the hell's going on here?" Silvana asked, and Sarah honestly wasn't sure how to explain it all and there was Jareth, tied to her with one hand, pressing his free hand to the bleeding wound in his side. She pressed her own free hand over his and he hissed in a breath, then he promptly passed out, keeled over, and took her down with him. Luckily, they'd already been down on their knees so the fall to the floor wasn't exactly far. 

"Sarah?" João said, as she untangled the chain from around their hands, or at least from around hers. She left it dangling rather uselessly from his.

"We need to get him to a hospital," she said, and she didn't need to glance up at the two of them to know they'd be frowning at her over that particular statement, but she looked at them anyway. "Look, trust me. I'll explain on the way." 

João hauled Jareth up from the floor, looking less than convinced about the situation, and Sarah can't exactly say that she blamed him for that - he'd wished away his baby sisters about thirty years before, then he'd lost to Jareth in the labyrinth and as far as he knew neither of the twins had ever returned. He hauled Jareth through the door though he looked like he'd've vastly preferred to wrap his hands around his throat and Sarah and Silvana followed close behind. Jareth bled on the floor as the toes of his boots dragged. He bled on the rug in Sarah's bedroom and down the hardwood floor in the hall and on the back seat of Silvana's beat-up Toyota while Sarah pressed her sweater to the wound and tried to explain what had happened in the mirror hall while João and Silvana weren't there. 

It didn't make much sense when she said it out loud. It didn't much more sense inside her head, to be frank. Everything they'd been told to make them go there had been false and it turned out Jareth hadn't been the bad guy, at least not that time, at least not for once. He hadn't been trying to invade anyone's kingdom - someone had been trying to invade his, and they'd unwittingly helped them. Sarah hadn't known till it was already too late.

João manhandled Jareth into the ER and then there were doctors and nurses and gurneys and shouting and over-bright, harsh lights overhead that made Jareth's unconscious body on the sheets seem starkly _real_ somehow in a way he never really had before, not more human but less like some kind of a fever dream. Sarah had always been half convinced in the back of her mind that Jareth was just a teenage fantasy and he'd never really existed. Right then, though, she was covered in his blood; it was difficult for him not to seem real.

"We found him like this," João said, and he flashed his badge and called himself _Detective Oliveira_. He said he'd take care of the investigation and that was the first Sarah knew that he was with the NYPD but what did she know about any of them? They rushed Jareth into surgery and when the nurse asked for his details Sarah remembers muttering something about them being at a costume party like the nurse had asked her to explain the way he was dressed and not why he was bleeding out all over everything in his immediate vicinity. 

"Are you family?" the nurse asked the three of them. 

Silvana shook her head; João had clipped his badge to his belt and just gave it a quick tap; Sarah was rubbing her bloody hands over her bloody knees in her bloody jeans as she sat there on the too-hard couch in the waiting room that smelled of stale coffee over cleaning fluid and she said, "He doesn't have any family around here." Because that was true, at least - he didn't. His family was invading the goblin kingdom and she'd put him there. She felt sick.

Silvana called her girlfriend from outside while she smoked a cigarette and João called home from his cellphone while he tried to get the vending machine to spit out a cup of coffee for each of them. Sarah was alone when the doctor came in. She thought maybe he'd died. She stared at her, still rubbing at her stinging knees.

"He's come through the surgery," the doctor said, and Sarah had no earthly idea why it was she was so relieved by that. "He's lost a lot of blood and he'll be unconscious for a while, and we're going to need to keep him here for a few days just to be sure...but he's a fighter. I think he'll pull through." 

Sarah remembers laughing. She remembers asking if she could see him. She remembers being led into the room where he was lying in bed and remembers seeing all the machines he was hooked up to, makeup smudged around his eyes, hair far from artistically tousled, and she remembers how it turned her stomach to look at him because apparently he was real. _Too_ real. He had a needle taped into the back of his hand so they could drip in saline and a bruise was already forming around it. She dragged a crappy plastic chair closer to the bed with a squeal of its legs against the floor and she sat herself down. She took his hand, the one with the needle in it, and it felt warm and heavy and there was still dried blood underneath his nails like there was under hers. He'd lost his kingdom and he'd almost died and it was all her fault. 

João tried to get her to leave a couple of hours later, to vacate the hospital and leave the whole thing to him, but she wouldn't because she couldn't. She stayed there in the uncomfortable chair next to his bed and João clearly didn't get it and Silvana wasn't really any closer to getting it than he was though she was a whole lot kinder about it. Maybe they hadn't made friends in the Goblin Kingdom they way she had, she remembers thinking, so it didn't mean as much to them that she'd let something dark and awful in. Maybe she really had killed them all. Maybe all that was left of the labyrinth and the goblin city and the whole goblin kingdom was lying unconscious in a hospital bed in New York City. She couldn't bear to let him go, too.

When the doctor came in again, Sarah startled awake and looked up at her. She was transfusing blood straight from her own arm and into Jareth's and when Sarah frowned, the doctor just shrugged at her and smiled. 

"Well, we both know human blood won't do him much good," she said. Sarah supposed that that made sense. And so the ER doc in the hospital she'd lived four blocks away from since she graduated college was the first fae she met in the human world, or at least the first she met knowingly.

Jareth says there are maybe a hundred fae in the human world at any given time, some new ones arriving and old ones returning every ten years when the worlds align and the doors can be opened. They leave for all kinds of reasons - for adventure, for a change of pace, for life away from magic - and some of them even come back when they're done. Some leave for something that sounds a lot like work experience or an internship or something like that that Sarah's never really understood the precise mechanics of it. Some leave because they're asked to, because there's a human that needs watching over and they're the one that's tasked to do it. What Sarah and the others hadn't realized was that sometimes, the wished-away children come back. 

The ER doctor is there to look over two humans, as it happens. Sarah met them one day, when she was buying flowers for Francine at work's birthday; they're a pair of twins in their mid-forties who own a flower shop in Queens, Maria Clara and Maria Luiza, and one dyes her hair black and one dyes her hair blond but otherwise they look exactly the same. The shop's called _Oliveira's_. Sarah sent João there once, and he hasn't stopped thanking her since. The end of the goblin world means a lot less to him now he knows his sisters made it out. Unfortunately, they know Silvana's sister didn't.

There are other fae around the world, and Sarah's met a lot of them when they've come in to speak to Jareth - they treat her surprisingly well, but she suspects that's because they make their own assumptions about her, or at least about her relationship with with the Goblin King, and neither he nor she has ever bothered to make a correction. One works for a bank somewhere in Europe and opened an account in Jareth's new name so really, neither one of them needs to work at all. One manages a team of goblins making glass in Newark. One works for the US government doing who knows what and Sarah doesn't really want to know the details of it; all she knows is the passport with Jareth's photo on it that's in the desk drawer next to hers looks _really_ real, even if it calls him Tomáš Nováček. 

"Do I look like a _Tomáš_ to you?" Jareth asked her when he looked at it that first time. She remembers finding the frown on his face amusing even though he was standing on a spot on the hardwood floor where she'd spent an hour scrubbing up his blood. 

"Well, you don't not," she remembers saying. "And it's not like beggars can be choosers." 

He muttered something about not being a beggar, but he didn't otherwise complain. Sometimes, she calls him _Tom_ just to rile him up. It's ridiculously easy. And when she does it's easier to ask him things because he'll tell her just to spite her, because he thinks she doesn't really want to know the answer, or she'll ask in bed, when he's inside her, and he'll answer he because he just can't help himself. 

Sometimes he looks like he resents her for it after, but she's never asked him to forgive her, not for anything. Sometimes she thinks she wants him to. Or maybe she's just looking for a way she can forgive herself.

\---

Three days before her twenty-fifth birthday, Sarah saw a fairy sitting cross-legged on top of the French press on her kitchen counter. She blinked and it was gone again, but it unnerved her all the way to work.

Two days before her twenty-fifth birthday, Sarah saw a fairy sitting in the shrubbery outside the park where she ate her lunch. It waved at her and she frowned, sunshine reflecting in its shiny wings so brightly she had to look away. When she looked again, it was gone, but she started to think it wouldn't be long before it was back again. She wasn't wrong.

The day before her twenty-fifth birthday, Sarah saw a fairy sitting on the bathtub faucet. Unfortunately, she was in the bath at the time; she gave a rather undignified shriek and her arm shot out for her towel, but the fairy just looked amused. By the time her towel was as soaked with bathwater was she was, roughly four seconds later, the fairy was already gone.

On her twenty-fifth birthday, Sarah saw a fairy sitting on the rim of her coffee cup as she leaned forward from the couch to pick it up. 

"Oh!" she said, startled, as she jerked her hand away. 

"Oh?" the fairy replied, with a tilt of its tiny head. 

"Well, I wasn't exactly expecting you," she said. 

"You weren't?"

"Not on my coffee cup, at least."

"Well, you didn't seem to like it when I popped up on the faucet."

Sarah had to admit she saw a certain logic in that. It was definitely fairy logic, but it was logic nonetheless. 

"I don't mean to be rude," she said, peering at the fairy, "but can I ask what you're doing here?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Not really, no."

The fairy frowned and it fluttered down onto the coffee table. "We need your help," it said, standing there on top of one of the obscenely flowery coasters her stepmom had sent her for Christmas, somehow looking even more out of place. 

"You do?"

"Not me personally." 

"So who sent you?" She narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. "Is this one of Jareth's tricks?"

The fairy stamped its little foot and made the coffee ripple. "I don't work for Jareth," it said, looking really quite irked about it as it did.

"So who _do_ you work for?"

It puffed its chest up proudly. "The Faerie King," it said, like that meant something terribly important.

"I thought that was Jareth."

The fairy huffed and crossed its arms over its chest. "He's the _Goblin King_ ," it said, like that should have been perfectly obvious to all concerned. "Don't you know anything? How are you meant to help us if you don't _know_ anything?"

And it vanished in a little puff of yellow glitter that scattered all over the table and floated on the top of what was left of Sarah's drink. She washed out her cup in the kitchen and made herself another coffee with just a splash of whiskey in it; she felt like she needed it, the conversation she'd just had. None of it made sense at all.

Three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, Sarah saw a fairy on the railing outside her window, teetering dramatically like it was walking a circus tightrope without a safety net. When it fell, its little wings buzzed till it touched down back on the railing - so much for no safety net, she thought.

"Can I help you?" Sarah asked, when she'd finally finished her drink and wandered over to open up the window. 

The fairy stopped and turned and beamed at her, all sharp little teeth, and she remembered somewhat ruefully being bitten by a set just like them. 

"Yes, you can!" it said, sounding very pleased that she'd offered, though she really hadn't meant it quite that way. "It'll be time soon."

"Time for what?"

"Time for you to help us, of course," it said, like that was obvious. "You're the only one who can, you know. You're the only one who can because you're the only one who's ever beaten him." 

"Help you do what?"

"Help us stop Jareth."

"Stop Jareth _doing what_?"

The fairy sighed. Its smile faded into a frustrated little frown. 

"He's trying to take over our kingdom," it said. "Didn't you know? I thought you'd know, you know. And I don't want to be Jareth's slave. You didn't either, so the king thought you'd understand. He said you'd help us. I only came here because he said you'd help us."

Sarah frowned. She _did_ understand, she thought; she'd been trying to forget her night in the labyrinth for years, but she did understand. She'd tried to forget the fairy that had bitten her and the door knockers that had done nothing but argue with each other. She'd tried to forget the cleaners and the way the clock's hands had spun around and the peach that had almost made her forget everything, not just that night, _everything_. She'd tried to forget the crystal ball that bounced on the stairs and Hoggle and Ludo and Sir Didymus, the helping hands and the bog of eternal stench, the goblin city and the castle and the labyrinth and all of it - she'd tried to forget _all_ of it. 

It had never been because she'd wanted to forget, though, because she'd never really wanted to. She'd tried to forget because she knew she should and in time, when she graduated high school, when she went away to college, she'd tried to forget for long enough that she'd really almost started to forget. By the time she'd finished college and gotten herself a crappy admin job with an off-off-Broadway theater that wasn't really making money, it wasn't as easy to recall their faces when she thought about them, or even their names. At twenty-five, assistant manager of the same little place by then and writing theater reviews on the side for a little extra cash because after rent she needed it, she'd almost persuaded herself that she'd dreamed it all. 

But she hadn't dreamed it. She'd _almost_ believed it, but she never really had; she remembered Jareth's eyes and the tone of his voice and when she went out with the people from work, when she put on a skirt and heels so high she felt she might fall off of them, she tried to pretend she wasn't looking at herself in the mirror and thinking of a ball gown she'd never actually owned and ribbons in her hair that she hadn't put there. She'd never wanted to forget, and that meant she'd never forgotten the things that Jareth had done. It only took a moment to remember everything else, too, almost like she'd never left. 

And now there was a fairy on her balcony telling her the Faerie King needed her help to stop Jareth. She was inclined to believe it. It fit with everything else she knew about him perfectly. There was logic to it.

"Will you help us?" the fairy asked, coming very close to pleading. 

Sarah nodded. "Just tell me what to do," she said. 

These days, she knows why Hoggle was spraying fairies when they met. 

Fairies lie. It's the Goblin King that doesn't.

\---

"You don't know what you're doing, Sarah," Jareth said. "If you let him in, that's the beginning of the end of everything." 

"Are you honestly saying you're the good guy here?" Sarah asked, incredulous, as she held on tight to the chain she'd wrapped around his wrist. It had caught him off guard to say the least, though she's still not sure if that was more because of the chain or because he hadn't expected to see her. "And you expect me to believe it?"

"I'm saying I'm the lesser of two evils," he replied. "And your friend here is not all that she seems to be. Isn't that right, Eleanor?"

Eleanor took the crystal ball from inside Jareth's jacket. He didn't try to stop her, because at that point he couldn't. The chain around his wrist bound him to Sarah, body and power and soul; he could barely even move because of it, and then again neither could she. Trapped in the struggle as they were, they rendered each other impotent. 

"I don't know what you mean," Sarah said. 

"Do you think everyone fights to take back the child they wished away?" Jareth replied. "Eleanor didn't; she was glad he was gone and he's still here. You wish you could have stayed too, don't you, Eleanor? You wish you could have stayed instead of him. Are you doing this because I sent you home?" 

"He's a liar," Eleanor said, as she approached the mirror with the crystal ball there in her hand. "You know he's a liar, Sarah." 

The problem was she didn't know that. Jareth is a lot of things, and not many of them good things because he's never not been the worst man she's ever known, but she didn't know he was a liar. She's still ashamed that she didn't see the truth right then. Maybe it's not true but she sometimes thinks the fairy might have told Eleanor quite a different story; she sometimes thinks the fairy used the word _revenge_ , or maybe just promised her things that she could never have. 

"You've always been so quick to believe the worst of me," Jareth said. "Have you stopped to consider that you might be wrong?" And now she thinks about it, after the fact, she thinks she might have even known she was but stubbornly refused the facts. 

"Do it," she said, and Eleanor did it. She opened the door on Sarah's say-so, and she let in the nightmares from the other side. She let in the Faerie King. The goblin glass broke.

These days, Sarah's honestly not sure what she knows and what she doesn't. All she really knows is what she's seen, and lately little of it's good. 

There are other worlds through the mirrors in the hall, and she knows that now. That night, two years ago now with Jareth's cut-off hair strewn all over the floor, they went into the bedroom and once they'd changed - maybe he was recognizable in jeans and a shirt but there are things he has that make much more of an impression - he opened up the closet door and he held it open for her. On the other side, just like always, the hall of mirrors waited like a station between worlds. 

There are eleven mirrors left today, just like there were that night, each in different frames. A couple are plain wood or ornate gilt, one solid silver and covered all over with sapphires, one made of copper so oxidized it had turned dark green all over. She remembers the faerie mirror and its wrought iron frame. She wonders where it landed. She wonders what else came through.

"So, which one do we choose?" Sarah asked, looking over them. 

"Not that one," Jareth said, pointing to the silver one with its sapphires. "We should save that one for last, if the others say no." Then he tapped at the one with the copper frame. "And not that one, either," he said. "I went there, once upon a time. I won't go back again." From the look on his face, she believed him. From the look on his face, she didn't want to know quite what they'd have found if they'd gone through. 

"And the rest of them?"

"Why don't you choose?" he said, and so she did. He took out a crystal ball he'd made for that purpose with the goblins in Newark and he opened up the mirror gate. And once they'd met the Elf Queen and her spiders, Jareth the the goblins really didn't seem so bad. If that was one of the places he thought was relatively safe, she hated to think what was waiting in the others. They're still working their way through those others now, one by one, bit by bit. 

Sarah has asked all the fae she's met in the past two years the exact same question: where do the mirrors go to? She's had some strange answers in response, from _somewhere else_ at the lowest end to a three-hour treatise on fae metaphysics at the other, not that she understood a lot of it since in so many ways they're just so different. She's honestly not sure who to believe, since she's not convinced all fae even from the goblin world are good, or right, or truthful, or even that they actually know the answer in the first place because the mirrors were obviously made so very long ago. But she's put together the consistent parts to make a story of her own. 

Long ago, there were only two worlds: the fae world and the human world. The thirteen high fae ruled the fae world as a council back in those days, but each of them wanted the world for themselves. They couldn't share. And so, they decided that they'd just make new ones. 

The goblins back then were the very greatest of craftsmen - they worked metal like masters and turned gems to perfection but their greatest, highest skill was always when they worked with glass. Goblin glass was used to spy, to enchant, to communicate across great distances or to see into the human world or sometimes speak with it, amongst other things, and so it was the perfect medium for what the council had in mind: the goblin craftsmen labored to fashion twelve great mirrors from their most special glass, and the high fae pressed all their magic into them, through them, and they made what those mirrors reflected real. The twelve mirrors became doorways into twelve perfect copies of the fae world. Twelve high fae stepped through, with their followers and retinues behind them. Only the leader of the council, the Goblin Queen, remained behind in the goblin world, to rule it. 

Over the years, discontented with having only one kingdom each to rule, some of the high fae made themselves new mirrors, and new worlds sprang up beyond them. However, absent the goblins' great artistry, those worlds were made imperfect, flawed, just copies of a copy. Over the years, things in those worlds changed and changed the fae there with them; each new copy they made was worse than the last and held darker things within it, though Sarah sometimes suspects that's just some kind of labyrinth-related copyright protection that corrupts imperfect data. Now, there are more than a hundred fae worlds, and most of them lie through the mirror to Faerie. Most of those worlds belong to the Faerie King. They belong to Jareth's father. From what she's heard, he wants them all. Most of all, he wants the human world. It's never been copied, after all.

Sarah's asked what happened next, who the Goblin Queen was, what the deal is with Jareth, and all she really knows is that the queen was Jareth's mother just like the Faerie King is his father and Sarah thinks he must have inherited his mother's voice even if he has his father's looks. The stories all differ after that: in some of them she's benevolent and in some she's cruel, in some she was running from another high fae's advances and sought protection with the Faerie King, and in some she fought back all advances personally, either to herself and to her world. The only point on which they all agree is that Jareth locked the doorways through the mirrors, a trick of the goblin glass he'd learned to make as a child. He locked his father out and ended free passage between the worlds the fae had made. Now they're trying to forge alliances with the places that he locked away. Unsurprisingly, not all of the kings and queens are willing. 

Ten years from the broken mirror, the goblin and the human worlds will be aligned again and the Faerie King won't need goblin glass to let him through. It's been nearly three years already; they've had the power between them to step through three mirrors and get home in time for Sarah to head to work. It makes her feel normal though she knows she's not, because after she beat him in the labyrinth, when she went home, she took a piece of his power with her. What they're doing needs both of them. It needs them together.

Tonight, Jareth took her to the theater; he's not the considerate type and she doubts he ever will be, so it was more than likely just because he wanted to go there himself. And now they're back in Sarah's apartment, where he's been living now for almost three years, and as he comes toward her, all his clothes discarded, she's still not quite sure if it's power or duty or something else again that makes her want him. Perhaps, she thinks, as he slips into bed, she just wants him. Perhaps, she thinks, as he presses his mouth to the crook of her neck, as he pushes inside her, as she gasps in a breath and squeezes tight at his shoulders, she's always wanted him. 

He must want her, too, she thinks, or he wouldn't still be wearing the silver chain around his wrist, and now when she wraps a length of it around her hand, he doesn't try to stop her so she's in his head and he's in hers. He told her once that the goblins made that chain, not the fairies, and his father tried to use it against him but they'll use it instead. Together, they'll find an army, and together, they'll save both their worlds, but right now all she's thinking about is how he feels inside her. She wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him deeper. He picks up the pace; she groans; he doesn't try to keep himself from doing likewise. Times like these, he's at his most human. Times like these, she's at her most not.

Seven years from now, the worlds will align and the Faerie King will come for them. Jareth's world is already gone; she can't let him take hers, too. She's beaten one king already. She can beat another. _They_ can.

Sarah just hopes that they'll be ready, or one day there'll be nothing left at all.


End file.
